You’re trying to appeal to “my better nature”, to help me believe that FB can be changed. It wont work.
In 2007 or 2008 I promoted the idea amongst my friends to “poison the well”, to feed bad data into FB’s algorithms. If they enjoy Coke, talk about Pepsi, I said. If they vote Green, share far right news. I called it Falsebook.
It didn’t work, because the problems inherent in the advertising auctions are not very visible to users. They mesh with the echo chambers of our friend circles and fizzle into the background. We seek out echo chambers in order to feel safe and validated. It’s mostly fine when it’s just humans relaxing with friends. But when that echo is robotically generated from an accurate model of all individuals involved, it can be leveraged for all sorts of big scale shady crap. Advertising is the village idiot of this town and corportate-backed political propaganda is the warring gang lord.
And Zuck does what any market owner does.. sits back and rakes in profit, cleaning up the mess when it suits him. And mostly it doesn’t.
I’ve never felt it could be fixed from the inside. I’ve never thought it was a good idea to begin with but I let peer pressure and my magpie nature suck me in. I regret signing up for FB and GMail back in the day because corporate surveillance has fucked our society hard and let sociopaths run rampant.
You will not change my mind. I wasn’t contributing to the conversation in good faith. I shall assume you were. My original glib comment about FB abusing social networks wasn’t an invitation to learn a new perspective, it was a war cry, a flag raise, a call for comrades. I was hoping someone would respond with links to a new Scuttlebutt implementation or tell me about a cool Masto instance. Or try to explain why I should bother with Matrix. Or something more interesting than all of those.
The web is sick. Personalised advertising has made it ill. We need to fix it and I don’t believe FB or GOOG are interested in trying.
In 2007 or 2008 I promoted the idea amongst my friends to “poison the well”, to feed bad data into FB’s algorithms. If they enjoy Coke, talk about Pepsi, I said. If they vote Green, share far right news. I called it Falsebook.
It didn’t work, because the problems inherent in the advertising auctions are not very visible to users. They mesh with the echo chambers of our friend circles and fizzle into the background. We seek out echo chambers in order to feel safe and validated. It’s mostly fine when it’s just humans relaxing with friends. But when that echo is robotically generated from an accurate model of all individuals involved, it can be leveraged for all sorts of big scale shady crap. Advertising is the village idiot of this town and corportate-backed political propaganda is the warring gang lord.
And Zuck does what any market owner does.. sits back and rakes in profit, cleaning up the mess when it suits him. And mostly it doesn’t.
I’ve never felt it could be fixed from the inside. I’ve never thought it was a good idea to begin with but I let peer pressure and my magpie nature suck me in. I regret signing up for FB and GMail back in the day because corporate surveillance has fucked our society hard and let sociopaths run rampant.
You will not change my mind. I wasn’t contributing to the conversation in good faith. I shall assume you were. My original glib comment about FB abusing social networks wasn’t an invitation to learn a new perspective, it was a war cry, a flag raise, a call for comrades. I was hoping someone would respond with links to a new Scuttlebutt implementation or tell me about a cool Masto instance. Or try to explain why I should bother with Matrix. Or something more interesting than all of those.
The web is sick. Personalised advertising has made it ill. We need to fix it and I don’t believe FB or GOOG are interested in trying.